This can’t be a coincidence: an app called Confetti that’s released in the days before carnival. And it isn’t, though in itself this is not a carnival-app. Confetti offers a simple radar that lets you see where other confetti users are located within a radius of 25 meters. The ideal app for a party, that’s the idea. With this app you can poke someone and make initial contact with a mutual interest. But the intention is that the contact quickly turns into face to face conversations.
The app was developed by Dutch Coding Company, a young development company based in the incubator Startup at TU Eindhoven. The idea of the app comes from Reender Beks. He is the former CFO of Sapiens, the med-tech company in the High Tech Campus which was sold to Medtronic in 2014.
The idea first popped up when Reender was a guest at a wedding feast. Since all guests were given a green, yellow or red sticker to indicate whether they were single, ‘it’s complicated‘ or were occupied. The app uses the same colors to indicate the status of the user. At that point you can see the people around you as colored dots on a kind of radar screen. Hence the name Confetti.
Because in order to really test the app, you needed many people who are close to each other, it was decided to test in one city – and do so during carnival. Since the app was developed in Eindhoven and the authors all have a link to this cit, the choice was clear where to start. If the test succeeds in Eindhoven (which means: if people like the app and the underlying technology is working), it will later be rolled out nationally and then internationally.
Confetti can be downloaded here. Currently only for Android.